He's just one hand gesture away.
There's something very Nixonian about Scott Walker, but I've been having a hard time pinning down exactly what it is. Then Jeb Lund at
The Guardian totally nailed it.
Walker’s political record basically involves refusing to tell anyone what his plans are and then doing something politically craven: he first campaigned on fixing Wisconsin’s budget, then once elected decided that it was public-sector unions’ fault and used a short-term crisis as an excuse to gut them; he evaded discussion about potential anti-union “right-to-work” legislation by calling it a distraction, then signed a right-to-work bill; he ducked questions about legislating more abortion restrictions, then signed a 20-week abortion ban.
And that doesn’t even get into the hail of convictions and indictments in his administration and the campaign finance investigation that suddenly stopped thanks to Wisconsin Supreme Court justices who received donations from many of the same groups being investigated. Walker was always going to have trouble with the scrutiny of a national campaign, outside those justices’ reach and outside the demographics of an overwhelmingly white state whose racial divisions he heightened with the help of a sycophantic right-wing media.
It's the unique combination of political craveness and duplicity combined with a corruption so deep you can't find its bottom. That's what makes him the rebirth of Richard Nixon. If we were still in a war in Iraq, Scott Walker would be campaigning on a secret plan to end it while at the same time plotting how he would escalate it once elected. He's totally that guy. Except that, and this is one of the strangest things I've ever typed, he doesn't have Nixon's political charisma.